Musings: Every Person Is Unique

Musings: Every Person Is Unique. “People cannot be defined by pseudo-‘rules’”

A while ago, under my partner’s influence, I started using Douyin. I found it’s a genuinely good platform for entertainment videos, but the more I scrolled, the more of those “caption”-style videos it recommended to me.

Some people who think they’re clever have summed up the surface of the world into what they call “laws”. They believe they’ve seen through the rules of the world, but they ignore the basic science underlying the human organism, and they have even less reverence and respect for each unique person.

For two people in the world to be exactly the same, you’d need necessary and sufficient conditions on two fronts, the physiological and the psychological.

Physiologically, the two people’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) would have to be completely identical, setting aside genetic-engineering cloning (artificial replication of human genes is ethically prohibited).

The Human Genome Project (HGP) puts the number of known human base pairs at 3 billion. Under absolutely ideal conditions, with genes combined completely at random, the number of combinations is 4^(3×10^9); that is, under absolutely ideal conditions each of us is one in 4^(3×10^9).

But nothing is ideal. For one, genes don’t combine randomly; for another, genes mutate all the time, already while you develop from a fertilised egg into a person.

So it can’t be calculated simply; you can think of it as 1/∞.

For the complex calculation, see:

There’s plenty of time for evolution.

^Herbert S. Wilf, Warren J. Ewens. 2010. There’s plenty of time for evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2010, 107 (52) 22454-22456; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016207107

Psychologically, even two people with completely identical genes would think absolutely differently. Only at the same time t, in the same space s, in the same environment e, ignoring the randomness of mutation and ignoring that intangible thing called consciousness and thought, could they theoretically be the same, and that’s only theory.

Having felt how unique each person is, why do so many people in real society feel like they’re looking in a mirror?

In today’s society most people just go with the flow; they’ve never calmed down to think about what being human means. What the rulers at the top of society most want to see is stability, regularity, uniformity. As the capitalist and ruling classes, they build for those below what they consider stable living facilities and living areas. By changing how social facilities run and by steering opinion, they move one so-called “trend” onto another. That doesn’t stop people enjoying it, but their thinking has already been carried by the current, drifting toward the regular and the commonplace. How could people long used to taking the easy, steady path ever think of acting against their environment? Those “unified” by the rules and those who proposed the rules are all just bound by man-made laws.

We can’t overthrow the ruling class or fight the capitalist class, but we should treat them as meal tickets and make use of them without sinking into it, using them only as stepping stones on our own path.